Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy

dark.
       They set out in the morning with the first light, having breakfasted at the same long table on pork and biscuits in a pale gray murk up through which the steam from the food rose eerily. The women wore their sunday clothes, bonnets laid to hand for the trip, again saving the old woman who was still shrouded in the same voluminous material, neither dress nor housecoat but simply undifferentiated cloth in which she went shapeless and unhampered, moving in an aura of faint musk, the dusty odor of aged female flesh impervious to dirt as stone is or clay. They carried chairs out and waited in the chill dewfall while the boy took them one by one and set them in the wagon bed, the husband on the seat slumped and silent with the reins slack in his fingers and the single mule drowsing in like attitude, lifting its feet heavily. The women climbed aboard the wagon and took their seats, sweeping their skirts from under them against wrinkling—even the old woman by long habit—and when they were set the boy leaped up onto the box alongside the man and the man raised his head and turned to look at them, the five women sitting about in the housechairs with folded hands, then raised and let fall the reins and said Come up, and they surged forth in a mounting clash and rattle and advanced upon the road.
    She was wearing the dress again and the shoes, the shift rolled into the same bundle with her things inside and held primly in her lap. What time do ye figure us to get there? she said.
    Late mornin, the woman said, if this here old mule don’t die in the traces.
    He looks to be a right substantial mule to me.
    He’s about like everthing else around here, the woman said wearily. Here. Did I show ye this here quilt?
    No mam.
    She began to unwrap a package of its muslin cover and unrolled part of a large piecework quilt. If I could get these here girls to quilt we’d of had two or three.
    She bent forward to examine it. The boy had leaned over the back of the wagon seat to watch and comment.
    Last one I sold I got three dollars for it, but it was a double weddin ring, the woman said.
    Thisn’s right pretty, she said.
    The boy had pulled out the quilting and was turning it in his hand. I don’t see why anybody would want to give three dollars for a old quilt, he said.
    No, the woman said, because you cain’t give it if you ain’t got it. Here, don’t black it to where nobody won’t have it.
    The boy let it fall disdainfully and she rewrapped it in the muslin.
    It’s tedious to piece one for one person by herself, she said.
    Yes mam.
    The two girls said nothing at all and did not appear to be listening. The old woman had turned her chair partly sideways and rode peering into the passing wall of wet shrubbery as if she held camera with something that paced them in the black pine woods beyond. After a while she leaned precariously from the wagon bed and broke a small twig from a spicewood bush, held it to her nostrils a moment and then with her opaque orange thumbnail began to fray the end of it.
    They rode on through the new green woods under the rising sun where wakerobins marked the roadway with their foiled wax spears, climbing, the man jiggling the reins across the mule’s tattered withers, through a cutback and into brief sunlight where the old woman hooked her bonnet more forward on her head and peered sideways at the others like a cowled mandrill, her puckerstrung mouth working the snuff that lay in her lower lip, turning again, a jet of black spittle lancing without trajectory across the edge of the wagon and into the woods, descending, the man working the brake, the wagon creaking and sidling a little in loose gravel, onto the flatland again, fording a weedgrown branch where dead water rusted the stones and through a canebrake where myriad small birds flitted and rustled dryly like locusts.
    She watched the wet wheeltracks behind them go from black to nothing in the sand, caressing the rolled shift in her lap.